Tuesday, 10 March 2015

On Putin and Nemtsov

Hi all,

A pretty good summation of the assassination of one of Putin's most outspoken opposition leaders is here. In short, it's all very shady. I'm not interested so much in who did it, but what it says about the state of Russia today.

Is it an indication of a certain type of non-democratic political competition when opposition leaders are not only prevented from taking over the offices of the states, but are murdered? If it was Putin who ordered the assassination, what does that tell us about him, his confidence etc? Is he shifting on along the personal-institutional/authoritarian-totalitarian axes that we talked about in class today? 

It seems fair to say that no one has any hope of finding out what exactly happened and who was behind the murder. In a lot of liberal democracies assassinations etc might happen but there is a general belief that the truth will come to light. Does it tell us much about Russia that the official version of events almost certainly will not match up to reality?

Cam
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1 comment:

  1. Xavier Marquez10 March 2015 at 20:11

    It may not have been something Putin "ordered" - but perhaps something that someone thought would please him. Something like that went on in Nazi Germany (at a much grander scale), according to Kershaw: lower-level party functionaries would devise ever-more radical policy because Hitler had made it clear that it would welcome it. (Kershaw, quoting a Nazi party member, calls this "working towards the fuhrer").

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